Full Biography

I began my academic life as a historian of science interested in the social sciences and in particular demography. My dissertation work on population policy in Fascist Italy turned me into more of an historian of social policy and social problems. My second book on children’s issues in c.1900 Italy (abandonment, labor, delinquency, emigration) continues more or less in that vein. I have also done some work on emigration and ideas about emigration in that same period. My latest book (May 2016) is on the history of smoking in Italy.

My teaching has focused on nineteenth- and twentieth- century Europe and Italy (including specific courses on the mafia and fascism), though I have also looked at the very long-term question of Europe’s place in the world and taught several times a course on world history since 1945. In the last few years I have also taught “Edible Education 101," my version of a course sponsored by the Edible Schoolyard Project at UC Berkeley.

In terms of administration, I have been the director of the Collins Living Learning Center since 2011 and of the IU Food Project since 2015.

Beyond the academy, I have worked as a consultant on the issues of contemporary child immigration and integration in Italy (an EU project) and on smoking in post-World War II Italy (for a law firm). I grew up in Berkeley and have spent a number of years in Italy, mostly Rome, on various research trips and as a fellow of the American Academy in Rome.

“A Greater Italy: The Italianization of Argentina,” in Anthony Grafton and Marc Rodriguez, eds., Migration in History, (Rochester, NY: The University of Rochester Press, 2006

“Under the Stats of Fascism: The Italian Population Projections of 1929-31.” Popolazione e storia (1/2002): 95-111. [Reprinted in Jochen Fleisccacker, Henk A,. De Gans and Thomas K. Burch, eds., Population Projections and Politics. Critical and Historical Essays on Early Twentieth Century Population Forecasting. Amsterdam, NETH.: Rozenberg, 2003.]

“Legal Infanticide: Foundling Mortality and its Measurement in Turn-of-the-Century Italy with Special Reference to the Casa dell‚Annunziata of Naples.” Popolazione e storia (numero unico/2000): 123-49.